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City parks, clean water: Making great places using green infrastructure

The Trust for Public Land has recently released a report which highlights the integration of green infrastructure with public park lands.

This type of design serves a dual purpose because it allows for cities to manage storm water runoff while also meeting the recreational needs of its residents. The Alewife Stormwater Wetland project, which MWH, now part of Stantec, provided hydraulic modeling, wet infrastructure design and utility relocation and construction administration for, was highlighted as an exemplifying case study.

In its previous state, the basin “had an average of 63 sewer overflows per year that dumped about 53 million gallons of raw sewage into the brook. Roadway flooding and sewer backups occurred regularly, even with storms as relatively small as two-year events. Larger storms caused such bad flooding that the city’s nearby drinking water reservoir itself was compromised.” The new green infrastructure design allowed for the management of millions of gallons of stormwater, and converted the derelict land into a “trail [that] is like walking through a Monet painting” as described by William Pisano, senior consultant at Stantec.